


I'm With You

by SaltAndSmoke



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Comfort, Dark!Ten, Destruction, F/M, Friendship, Grief, Sadness, Tears
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-21
Updated: 2016-01-21
Packaged: 2018-05-15 09:27:54
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 609
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5780542
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SaltAndSmoke/pseuds/SaltAndSmoke
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Another One Shot. The Doctor has fucked up badly again and is slowly dissolving in self-hatred. If it wasn't for Donna, he could easily be losing himself...</p>
            </blockquote>





	I'm With You

The city was burning. Grey flakes of ashes and red sparks of fire shifted through the heavy, smokey air, floated around and sank on shoulders and heads, turning them ash-white or burning holes in fabric.  
The two figures walking away from the inferno did not seem to mind. They were of different height but even so, the skinny, tall man seemed to be smaller than the woman next to him, his shoulders rounded, his back bent, his head hanging low. They walked together in silence, away from the red gloom of destruction behind them, towards the yawning darkness, threatening to swallow them.   
Both of them wanted it to. 

 

“I could have saved them!”

The Doctor’s voice rang through the control room of his ship, loud even though he had whispered the words. 

“I - I could - they would still be alive if - if I -” 

His voice broke. He covered his face with blistery, soot-stained hands, rubbed at his skin and felt it peeling away in bits, coming off his cheeks and brow. 

“I am…useless. completely, utterly useless.” 

When he lowered his hands from his face, his skin started to tingle and burn even worse. The Doctor sighed in agony and frustration.  
Donna stood two feet away from him, looking at her feet. Her jacket hung over a handrail, alongside with the Doctor’s long coat, both still smoldering and more soot and smoke than anything else. 

The silence following the Doctors’ words rang with noise. Donna shook her head, hoping that the ringing the sound of explosions and the screams of dying creatures had seared into her eardrums would somehow disappear by that. 

“I’m…I’m sorry.” she finally managed to say. 

The Doctor’s defocused eyes met hers but he did not seem to see her. instead, he looked through her, seeing something that had been long ago or would only start to exist in a billion years time. 

“It’s always the same”, he whispered. “Wherever I go it’s the same. I bring destruction, Donna. I bring grief. I bring death. And that is all I do.” he made a soft sound, something between chuckling and sobbing. “You know what they call me? The Oncoming Storm. And they are right with that. So right. I can never stop. I’ve….killed. People. Donna, I am a killer. I am history and history repeats itself, or so…or so they say.” 

Donna stood and watched her best friend and companion falling apart, petrified, stunned. When the Doctor started to sob, filling the control room with tiny, gurgling sounds, she took a step forward and, hesitantly, took his hands in her own. 

“Look…I don’t usually come into the kind of situation where I need to tell a self-destructive, self-pitying alien…person how much the world needs them. Yet -”, she smiled an insecure smile, “here I am. Telling you exactly that.” 

The Doctor blinked and looked at his hand in hers. He swallowed. 

“But I…I’m responsible for their deaths, Donna. You’ve seen it yourself. I could have saved them and I…didn’t. Didn’t..didn – didn’t-” 

She did not know what to do. So she did the only thing that seemed logical.   
When she wrapped her arms around his skinny form, the Doctor leaned into her and buried his face into her soot-stained shirt, trembling and mumbling words in a language she didn’t understand.   
Donna tried to soothe him, lightly rubbing her hands across his back. For a moment, she was weirdly reminded of her mother, back then, at her father’s funeral. 

“Hey, I’m with you, okay? Always. Forever, remember?” 

He pressed closer to her and ever so slightly, the trembling stopped. 

“I do.”


End file.
